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Bad Book Covers: Buyers Judge Books By Their Covers

Bad Book Cover or just a bad idea?

This may come as no surprise to anyone, but buyers really do judge books by their covers. If you have an amateurish cover design, your sales will not only be negatively impacted it could actually hurt your book sales more than if you had no cover design at all. A good cover not only adds professionalism to your work, but can add depth and meaning to your story. The website, LousyBookCovers.com, has a great tag line: “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.”

The recent increase in self-published books has reduced the overall quality of book cover design tremendously. There’s a certain logic to it, but that doesn’t make it right. Authors actually make very little money on their writing, even with self-publishing. So in order to minimize their costs, they try to save money and design their own covers. The results are usually disastrous. See the links below for a good laugh.

Do The Math

If Oz was a barren red planet with fighter jets…

A professional book cover design can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Ouch. But let’s do some theoreticals here. Let’s say you spend $500 on a book cover design. A good book cover design could net you 25%-50% (or more sales). So, for the sake of this discussion, let’s say you’re selling 100 books per month with a net profit of $5 per book. If you increase your sales by 50%, that’s 50 more books per month. You recoup your design costs in two months and in the course of a year, sell 600 extra books, or an additional $2,500 with no extra cost (that you didn’t recover) to you. Now, this was all hypothetical, but the facts are: professionally designed book covers get at least 13-50% higher click-through rate online.

Left Hand Publishers offers professional book design services for their authors. These services are completely optional and authors getting published by Left Hand are under no obligation to use our design services. They are extremely affordable and more so just a courtesy, auxiliary service we offer to make it easier for authors to have professional covers designed for their books. Writers are more than welcome to use a third-party design service for their covers, but before Left Hand Publishers can offer a publishing agreement, we must be able to approve the design. A bad cover design will impact sales and that will impact Left Hand's percentage of the royalties. A book cover design that does not fit the required parameters, will cost more to print and may not printable at all. We are looking out for our authors' best interests and want them to have the most affordable and professional cover that will not only reflect their brand and manuscript but generate additional sales. For more information on our book cover design services at .